Fight in the theatre of war that changed the world forever. Battle alongside your compatriots on some of the most inhospitable environments of the Eastern Front in Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. Red Orchestra places you in the most realistic WWII first-person multi-player combat to date on the PC, allowing the player to fight through...

About This Game

Fight in the theatre of war that changed the world forever. Battle alongside your compatriots on some of the most inhospitable environments of the Eastern Front in Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. Red Orchestra places you in the most realistic WWII first-person multi-player combat to date on the PC, allowing the player to fight through some of the most intense combat of the war. You can play as infantry, using a wide range of infantry weapons, or crew one of the many armored combat vehicles available in the game, from half-tracks to the most famous German and Soviet heavy tanks. Engage the enemy with everything in your arsenal, from your bayonet at close quarters up to the massive 122mm cannon on the Soviet IS-2. And if that isn't enough, find an officer and a radio to call in thunderous artillery strikes to shake the enemy loose.

Engage enemy tanks at 800 metres and more with the Simulation-level armored vehicle combat

Fight the full range of combined arms infantry and vehicle combat in detailed environments based on real-world data, from city-centre to deeply rural settings

Realistic bullet and projectile ballistics will make you duck for cover

Coordinate strategies with your team-mates via Voice Over IP

Authentic Immersive Sound FX and 3d Positional Sound System

3D 'Iron Sights' and unique 3D scope system

True weapon deployment system including resting rifles on support

Historically accurate artillery system

Distance-based sound system dynamically creates the battle ambiance

Advanced player movement system featuring diving over obstacles and leaning

Custom 8 way animation system for highly realistic player animations

New for Summer '07

This update includes a new map, a new vehicle and some major graphical enhancements to the game and is available to owners of the game for free through Steam. The new map - Krivoi Rog - gives players the largest tank slugfest to date, with 16 square kilometers of terrain, 3000 meter viewable range and up to 50 players. This map also features the new vehicle - the German Panzer IV G, providing the German players with some additional fire-power for the mid-war period.

In addition to the new map and vehicle, an all-new adaptive bloom system has been added for the game's graphics, making the bloom crystal-clear even at low resolutions. For further eye-candy, Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering settings are now configurable in-game.

New for Spring '07

Ten new maps, the winning entries in Tripwire's Custom Map Competition. Tripwire worked with the developers of each of these maps to ensure the maps are optimized, polished, and gameplay balanced. Highlights in the new map-pack include:

"Smolensk Stalemate": the contest winning map features perfectly balanced to-and-fro infantry combat through ruined villages and trenches in August 1943."Leningrad": features close-quarters infantry fighting in the ruined streets of the city, above them in the bombed-out buildings and deep beneath them in the sewers, all with close-in armor support."Berezina": the After-Hourz team surpass themselves on this rural/village map, introducing not just a new vehicle (the Russian BT-7 light tank), but also the first functional anti-tank gun in the game. To cap it off, the BT-7 even carries tank-riders."Black Day July": one of the very best for tank combat fans, set in the rolling countryside around Prokhorovka as German and Russian armor clash en masse during the Battle of Kursk.

Increased player limits. A new level of intensity with 50+ player multiplayer battles (up from the previous limit of 32).

New community made content, including the Russian BT-7 light tank with infantry tank riders and the first player controllable anti-tank gun in the game.

New soundtrack: The "Orchestra" comes to the Ostfront - the game now features a complete in-game soundtrack from composer Matthew Burns.

Gameplay enhancements. The addition of several features requested by the clan/ladder/league community to enhance competitive play.

I bought this game the day after it came out, it's one of the best games I ever purchased. It put you on the frontlines of battles that have been fought in countless other games, and in battles that only existed in history books, in photographs, in survivors stories, and in the numbers of lives lost. Some of these battles were never put into a game before.

The game itself was a huge achievement, and it went on to inspire many successful and fun mods. What more can I say after all these years and fun? Play this game, that's what.

I love this game, alot more that RO2. Ignore how outdated the graphics of this game are, just play it for it's fun, addicting, gameplay. A great game every WWII game lover,like me, can love. Bottom line, one of the top ten WWII shooters out there, gotta be.

Favorite FPS overall. I still prefer it to Red Orchestra 2. I wouldn’t say it’s popular, but not completely dead either: there’s at least one active European server that gets full every day. There’s one in the U.S. too. Even the development process isn’t entirely dead. Modders from The Darkest Hour team are working on a new patch that should come out in early 2015.

Slower pacing. People don’t tend to run around at breakneck speeds quite as much. Twitch reactions are not as important, and this game is noticeably easier to play for me.

Weapon balance. Weapons have a lot more recoil and sway when shooting from standing or crouching position. This means that resting your weapon on random objects for support is very important and players tend to use cover more. Simple bolt-action rifles are incredibly powerful: they do a lot of damage and are significantly more accurate than semi-autos. You can either have good rate of fire or good accuracy (RO2 semi-autos, by contrast, give you both, and an SVT-40 is almost always better than a Mosin). One could argue that this isn’t very realistic, but it makes playing as a rifleman fun, whereas in HoS it can be very hard and frustrating. Or maybe I’m just hopelessly bad at playing rifleman in RO2.

No spawning on squad leaders. You have to actually walk or ride from spawn to the capzone. It increases the value of your life and value of life of your enemies. When you kill someone, he’s not going respawn in vaguely the same place in 10 seconds. You won’t see him again in at least half a minute (or more for large maps). And it helps to avoid the situation where if you spawn on SL, you're likely to immediately die, but if you don’t, you’re not in the capzone, you’re not helping your team cap, you’re not protecting your SL. Survival in situations like these depends largely on luck: if you happen to spawn behind cover, you’re good, but if you spawn in the open where one of the enemy machine gunners can see you, you’re boned and will have to try again. This can be very annoying in RO2.

Darkest Hour (a mod) has one of the best spawning mechanics I’ve seen in this type of game: MDVs (Mobile Deploy Vehicles). Basically, an MDV is an APC with a spawn point inside. You can park it anywhere, but it’s bulky and noisy — hiding it behind enemy lines can be tricky. When you spawn in it, you can have a look around and hop out when you think it’s safe-ish. Or, if it clearly isn’t, you can try moving it to a better position. It’s vulnerable to satchels, panzershrecks and whatnot, so the chance to die immediately after spawning is still there, but at least it’s not random and it’s very rare.

No stat grinding or unlocks. When you start playing, your weapon is identical to the ones used by players who have played this game for years. They won’t have faster running speed, faster reloads or resistance to suppression. Joining a winning team won’t make you level up faster, and blatant team stacking is fairly rare. Most matches feel more balanced.

No UAVs. You can use vegetation and ruined buildings to hide for a long time and nobody’s going to find you unless they see or hear you. Unfortunately, people can still fly around as spectators when they’re waiting in a spawn queue. There’s a mutator that blacks out the screen when the player is dead, but most servers don’t run it nowadays.

Plenty of large combined arms maps with open design, including some really huge tank-centric maps. There’s an achievement for destroying a tank at 2000+ meters. And popular servers actually run these: it’s not like Counter-Strike or TF2, where there are thousands of community maps available, but most servers stick to stocks like de_dust2 and cp_dustbowl.

Huge variety of weapons and vehicles. You can play as Soviets, Germans, Americans, Brits, Australians, Canadians, Romanians, Italians, Hungarians, Poles and Finns. Some of the vehicles included: BA-64 (aka the clown car), Panzer II Flamm and OT-34 (flamethrower tanks!), ISU-152 (152 mm self-propelled gun), Sturmtiger, Sturer Emil, Marder III Ausf. M, SdKfz 234/2 “Puma”, BMW R71 motorcycle (with or without sidecar), ZiS-3 truck, Willys and Volkswagen Kübelwagen, STZ-5 (although it’s used as an infantry transport) and even a farming tractor. Not to mention a good number of Italian and Hungarian tanks (even World of Tanks doesn’t have these). There are AT and FlaK guns, boats, planes you can paradrop from, mortars you carry around and setup wherever you like. You can also use tanks to transport infantry.

Tank crewmen can get out of their vehicles and get back in. It adds immersion, allows you to park your tank in a safe place, get out and gather intel with your binoculars (silhouette of a person with binocs is nowhere near as noticeable as a tank on the horizon). It also makes it possible to bail out and continue fighting on foot or join a different crew when your tank is damaged. Tank crew frantically getting out of a burning tank is something you’ll never see in RO2.

Team-tanking is fun and useful, whereas in HoS you’re often better off with bots even if you use voip. It’s just faster to press W and have your tank move forward immediately. In RO:Ost, it is faster to switch to driver and press W too, but you won’t be able to reload the gun at the same time. Or keep an eye on the enemy. So, a fully crewed tank with voice comms is likely to outmaneuver a solo tanker, which isn’t true in RO2.

I love the way you have to turn the tank turrets using keyboard, not mouse. Having to control each axis separately is more immersive than just pointing at the target with a mouse cursor. It feels more like turning two separate cranks.

Your character won’t give away your position by making random loud remarks while you’re trying to sneak.

There are doors you can open and close. Even Wolfenstein 3D had this feature, but RO2 doesn’t.

Red Orchestra is without a doubt the quintessential World War II PC game, one that not only provides a satisfying and authentic shooter experience, but also involves players in the seldom seen part of the war: the horrific and bloody Eastern Front. It has a slower pace than your common shooter; players must plan their shots, take cover when necessary, and use teamwork to successfully capture objectives. The community has been amazing, with modders creating the Western Front (Darkest Hour), the Romanian Front (Carpathian Crosses), and the North African campaign (Mare Nostrum). Red Orchestra II has unfortunately failed to capitalize on the successes of its predecessor, and therefore the original game still remains one of the best World War II games of all time.

An amazingly realistic game. The graphics are a bit dated and the community small but the gameplay and immersion are top notch. It's even more fun to play with friends; where the gameplay can be anywhere from hilarious to gritty and intense warfare.

The graphics may be old, no where near Ro2 or any other fps out there - but that's not the important factor. In this game, you can immerse yourself fully, and it has that realistic feel to it that cannot be achieved by other games that are this old - and even first person shooters now. There's something special about this game that makes it unique.

It's great for those who love WW2 Realistic shooters. There are also mods, such as Dark hour, which people still play - and in those mods you can parachute from a plane and into german territory, or experience D-day as you charge into enemy fire whilst machine gun fire, smoke, explosions and screams surround you.

If you're interested in buying this game - do it while it's still on sale! You're our only hope in making this game come back to it's full potential as a multiplayer game and is nothing without great, enthusiastic players. Tell your friends, family or whoever and get playing!

As for players, servers are usually packed around 4pm GMT onwards and it rises significantly from there. We hope to see you soon.

This game is definitely fun and at times even moreso than the new one. It certainly has shown its age, but if you can look past that, it has infinitely more content than Heroes of Stalingrad. The problem is simply finding servers with people to play with. Gameplay is definitely less streamlined, but there are much more actions, guns, tanks, and maps. It's also much more unforgiving than the sequel. If you're looking for a tactical shooter with a ton of features and are willing to take the time to find a full server then you should buy this.

Edit: also this game has a ton of mods that come with the game for free

If you want a Red Orchestra game, but 2 is a bit too much for your computer, then grab this one! It's kinda a lite version of 2, and with dumbed-down graphics, but still guarantees you fun! (multiplayer is kinda dead, that's the only con I've found so far)

Red Orchestra Story:i play red orchestra 4 long time i telll all friends gr8 game tey think it relly weird and bad gruphics den i convice one friend 2 play he go in as machingunnnnerre and kill 7 meen then he go pick up eneemy snip3r rifle and camp bridge under cunstant fire from plebs with tunks and lmgs then pprocedes 2 get 6 killz with snuper one of dem was one shot 2 kil i said and i know i unistall game

BUMMER I thought I had read solo play too. I don't like multi-player and my inet isn't fast enough to really play multi-player games. Luckily was cheap at 2.49. Maybe sometime they'll bring cable in the boonies here.Played practice. View when driving a tank is really limited. (as it probably really is). but kinda takes the fun out of it. Still I managed to beat a practice mission fine. Graphics are ok for a older game. I'll have to give it another look someday, but I have so many better games on my iMac to play at this point.

I suppose I could recommend it as a multi-player for 2.49 I'd not recommend you pay more.

Bought in 2007-2008. This closer to realism you cannot get with gameplay mechanics (in good way). Soviets and germans speak their own language. You need 2-3 drivers for tanks. Playerbase is somewhat strong. There is pretty much always at least 1 full server of 50 players at nights.

Only downside is that aiming is somewhat slow, when clicking with mouse. And jumping is awkward and stamina eater. And there are maps, where you have run alot to get shot from far away, if not careful.